To say "mums, get photos of yourself, and you are not just a mum"

[dandelionfluffy]

We are planning my mother's funeral as sadly she died last month after a very short and rapid decline from being a completely independent retired, divorced teacher with a wide circle of friends and interests.
We are looking through her photos and there is a huge gap between when I and my sibling graduated from university to when my oldest DN was born.
She never seems to have had photos taken of herself though she has lots of prints from that decade or so. During that time my sibling and I both lived abroad in two different countries each and she visited us. My and her photos from those trips show landscapes, or me/sibling and our friends.
I'm not that surprised in retrospect because she had a very strong identity as parent and grandparent, but she also did some fairly adventurous independent travel in those years and had a very active social and work/retired life. It's sad to me that either she didn't see that as important or she didn't see photos of her as important.
So, for your DCs sake, take photos and get people to take them of you!

I'm not sure it's a choice, more of something she didn't think about, and noone else did either, sadly.

This is something DH’s Granny says, but about the family photo taker rather than mums specifically (although in many families that is the mum).

When DH’s grandad died, and then DH’s uncle a couple of weeks later they realised that they were the two who organised and took all the family photos. Despite being men who loved photos and who always had a camera in their hand there were very few photos of them.

I completely agree with you OP and I think it’s selfish.

My mother has a strong aversion to having her photo taken so we hardly have any of her. Those we do have, she has her face covered in most of them. She’s more bothered about looking old and fat than she is about us having pictures of her even though she knows it bothers us.

To me, photos are also memories, they help keep them alive.

We had to search through to find photos of my mum for her funeral , yes there were wedding day photos and family photos but not many of just her .
One thing I did do ( before the dementia set in) was go through a massive box of photos and get her to write on the back who these people were.
There's a photo of my grandad ( born 1901) with his mother and father, brothers and sisters . Then when the dementia did affect her memory we could chat about them .

I think now we're so used to photos on your phone, delete the rubbish ones .
But when I was a child it was a photographer who would go an develope them, or a camera with a spool that you took into Boots and waited a week , or the Polaroid which were fairly instant but £ .

So what, though? She should override her own dislike of being photographed so that you can have photos of her that she doesn’t want taken?

It’s not that she didn’t see herself as important! It’s that she was too busy experiencing life and had no interest in selfies or pics of herself doing stuff.
There are few pics of me at all because I’m the photographer in the family, but because I don’t value myself. I think your point of view is very patronising.

Sounds to me as though you are manufacturing an issue when there isn't one!

Not everybody sees their life as a photo opportunity to document it.

Quite ironic that your mum seems to have had a healthy attitude to life where as you are coming over as quite obsessive in your need to document and photograph life instead of living it .

I don't mean to be harsh because you are grieving your mum but honestly how do you think people managed before we had mobile phone camera's? Do you think everyone went round with their Box Brownie or their Instamatic thinking i must take a photo to document my life? The mobile phone camera is just another thing that has skewed life away from reality.

I'm so sorry for your loss.

I understand that you wish you had photos of your mum living the full and interesting life that she did outside of parenting and grandparenting.

I'm a big photo person, so I will heed your thread and try to not always be behind the camera.

It's important to remember too how much our attitudes to photography and pictures have changed. I know mine have.

In the 80s I would but postcards as a record of a trip. In the mid 90s and 2000s cameras got good enough to have a hope of taking decent shots as an amateur so I took pictures of landscapes and buildings as an attempt at art (representing landscapes as an art form sort of akin to watercolour)

Digital photography meant more throwaway shots of things you wouldn't waste film on, and more people, but really it was social media sharing that put people back in the frame - any good landscape photo could have been grabbed off the Internet so you put yourself in it to prove it was your photo almost. That changed people's tastes and fashions.

And when I talk about people in photos, I really mean the adults. People have always captured children and childhood because it's fleeting. There is much less if a habit of documenting adult lives. I can look back on my holiday or hiking photos and see the shift from "photo of the holiday I was on taken by me" to "photo of the holiday I was on taken with me in it"

Please don't feel like your mum didn't value her activities because she didn't take photos of herself doing it. That's really quite a modern idea.

Generally, mn disapproves of photography. It’s seen as faintly narcissistic and as evidence you are trying to prove something.

I understand what you’re saying @dandelionfluffy and sorry for your loss. That said I also hate having my photo taken (but have thousands of my children!)

I get why you're sad that you don't have photos of your Mum outside of that period, but I don't really get why you think that that means she didn't think the rest of her life was worth documenting?

Your Mum's photo taking habits sound a lot like mine. I take photos because they're of something I want to remember.

I've got loads of photos of DD that I took, or photos of DD with DP, or with her grandparents etc, or group shots that include me that I took with a timer, because those are things I'm interested in seeing again. And there's loads of photos of me with DD and other family members that for instance DP took.

But when I'm off doing something by myself, I don't need photos of me. I'm taking photos of the things I saw, the experiences I had. When I had those experiences, I couldn't see me, so why would I want the photos of them to include me?

Earlier this year I did a big trip by myself, cycled around 400 miles over a week. I took around 100 photos. Of the view, of people I met, of hotel rooms, of pints of beer in pub gardens, of my bike laden with all my luggage, of the flat tire I got etc. There's a grand total of two pictures of me during that trip, one that DP took out of our bedroom window as I left, and one of me at the finish line with the Cutty Sark in the background, that I took to send on Whatsapp to other people. That photo wasn't really for me. I wanted the pictures I took on that trip to be a reminder what what I saw, to tell a story so that I could remind myself "Oh yes, thats where I was on that day, that's where I got a flat tire, that was the absolute shithole I stayed in on night 3"

Don't get me wrong, I'm not averse to my own image. Yes, I'm a balding fat 40 year old man, but I have absolutely no body image issues. In fact I have a belief that I'm an absolute physical specimen that goes entirely unsupported by reality.

I think it may partly be that I'm aphantasic. I can't form pictures in my mind. So 30 seconds after I've seen a lovely view, I couldn't describe it to you. So for me, pictures are way to remember what I can't remember. They're a way of saying "This is what I saw through my own eyes". I don't want a selfie, that's not useful to me, it's not what I saw.

Sorry, that was long winded, but what I'm trying to say is that I don't think you can say that a lack of pictures of your mother means that she didn't find her experiences outside of being a mother worthy of documenting. It's not like she didn't take any photos during that time. She just took the photos that meant something to her, rather than the ones that other people would want to see.

My Mum hated having her photo taken. I also hate having my photo taken. At Mums funeral my father had pictures of my Mum in which she looked terrible, that fake smile she put on for 'official' photos taken on cruise ships or at garden parties. Everybody who knew her said they didnt need photos because they have their own favourite memory of her, usually from when there weren't any cameras. The best photos of her are from when she was young, before she was married and pre children. I have those in an album and one in a frame. The best photos of me are also pre children when I was much younger and none of the photos are staged despite being taken on a camera loaded with film. I don't do selfies and would prefer to take the photo than be in it. Am I odd?

Yes it feels like this. Some very contrarian responses here. It’s sad when mums are not included in the photos of our lives. I also think it’s sad that so many people are so self critical about their appearance - I’m no beauty at all, but hating the way you look seems a bit hardcore.

My point is not "my mum should have taken more photos of herself to please me". My point is "it's obvious my mum only took photos of herself when she saw the occasion was important and she only saw occasions as important if she was being a mum or a granny".
Other things in her life were very important, but she gave the impression she was just on hold.

What is obvious about it? Why do you equate taking photo with importance of occasion? Or why do you think she did?

She found pleasure in taking photos with young children in the family. She probably liked looking at them because of the children.

The other things in her life were important for her, but not in a way that would lead her to take a photo of herself there. The landscape was what she saw there and wanted to remember. She knew she was there and didn't need to document that.

As @deplorabelle put it,
Please don't feel like your mum didn't value her activities because she didn't take photos of herself doing it. That's really quite a modern idea.

I hate having my photo taken and it has occurred to me, on occasionn that if I was missing there wouldn't be any pictures for the appeal.

For the last couple of decades I've been a runner, so there are races pictures, but they're never very flattering!

dandelionfluffy – I can really feel the grief and love behind your post, and I think I understand where you're coming from. It's not about wanting more pictures for you, it's about wishing your mum had seen herself as someone worth capturing outside of her roles. That's a really tender and valid feeling.
At the same time, I wonder if she maybe just didn't think of photography as a way to document herself – more as a way to capture moments she wanted to remember through her eyes. My own mum is exactly the same – she'll take a hundred photos of us or the dog, but if I try to snap her reading in the garden or laughing with friends, she waves me away. It's not that she thinks those moments don't matter; it's that she doesn't see her face as the important part of the memory.
I don't think you're being unreasonable at all – your sadness makes total sense. But I also don't think your mum saw herself as "just a mum." She probably just saw the camera as a tool for preserving what she loved looking at, not what she looked like. It's a generational thing, maybe, more than a reflection of her own self-worth.
Sending you a hug, and thank you for the reminder to step in front of the lens more often.

But she did document it, just not including herself in the image.

If she didn't have hang ups about appearing in photos, then is seems that she probably appeared in as many photos as she wanted to.

I guess that she wanted pictures WITH her loved ones, not focused on her role as a mother/gran, but just because the event was about the people, not the place.

Your point is an interpretation of the available facts, though -- that she didn't think her life was worth documenting outside of her identity as a mother and grandmother. Other interpretations are available, though, such as @VimesandhisCardboardBoots 's account of his travels, which chimes completely with my own position. That many people, me included, take photos of what they want to be reminded of, and that's what they saw and experienced, not their own presence in a particular scene. I have very few photos of myself that don't include DS. That in no way means I don't think my professional and other identity is worth documenting. It means I am more interested in a photo of Angkor Wat than in a photo of me at Angkor Wat.

Can you have a montage of photos of all those places she's been to, at her funeral? That would be a nice way of honouring those years.

I even take it to silly extremes and tend to think, well, many excellent photographers have taken pictures here, mine won't be as nice.

I still take pictures, but I'm just as happy looking at a map of somewhere I've been as I am my amateur photos.

I don’t know what I’ll do when DH dies. We were married 7 years ago and I think he’s been in three photos since then. Avoids them like the plague, some people do.